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Contact


Email glitterfishlara@gmail.com
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About


I am a community artist and educator with over 20 years experience. In all my roles and projects, I aim to use creative practice to enrich lives and promote social change. I endeavour to provoke a response in participants and the audience that makes them stop, think and question, possibly shifting opinions or inspiring them to challenge the status quo through their conversations and actions.
In the last 12 months my work has developed around changing migration narratives and challenging xenophobic representations and inhumane developments in government policy. I have been working closely with Care4Calais, local community groups and other voluntary organisations to develop projects and activities that build relationships between immigrant and host communities facilitating opportunities for exchange of skill, knowledge and culture (transculturation) in both directions, an idea initiated by Tania Bruguera in her 2019 “School of Integration”.




Participatory Workshops



I often facilitate participatory projects collaborating on large scale mosaics, sometime purely aesthetic but often inspired by social issues.

In 2020, I worked with years 5 and 6 to produce 2 mosaic plaques (100cmx100cm) for the school, which combined the school logo and the Manchester Bee.  The children also had the opportunity to make an individual piece of work They loved learning new skills, having the opportunity to use real tools and being able to use the skills they’d learned on the group project to unleash their creativity.

Recent projects include a series of transition workshops in a high school which received high acclaim from participants and teachers/ support workers as an agent to building confidence, positive relationships and an understanding of their value and importance in a social group. Students worked together to produce a series of 7 mosaics illustrating the transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly, a metaphor for the formative process of learning and change in high school. Another great project was the product of the Oasis Day Centre, which provides food, social support and training to anyone in need in the local community. Working with the theme of “Home Is Where The Heart Is”, participants designed and made hearts for the collaborative outcome and also to take home. These were collated in the title image above.